The world in AD 500

Africa

Carthage belonged to the Vandals. They had held the city since 439 and had sacked Rome in 455; their king in AD 500 was Thrasamund (r. 496–523). Jona Lendering’s Livius summary of Procopius describes the strain in Vandal Africa between a ruling elite that followed the Arian form of Christianity and a population that followed the Creed of Nicaea. On the other side of the continent the kingdom of Aksum had struck its own coins since the third century and had been Christian at court since King Ezana (r. 320–350) replaced the crescent-and-disk on his coinage with a cross. In the later fifth century, according to the Metropolitan Museum’s Africa department, missionaries who had left the Eastern Roman Empire after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 carried that faith from the royal elite to the wider population.

• Which African kingdom minted gold coins and raised 23-meter stelae?AD 350

West Asia

Kavad’s return had a price. He had been deposed in 496, imprisoned, and had escaped to the Hephthalite court; he came back with a Hephthalite contingent and a Hephthalite bride, and Schindel writes that he no doubt paid the Huns substantially for his restoration. The Arabic and Persian histories, Procopius and the chronicle attributed to Joshua the Stylite agree that the nobles had removed Kavad because of his connection with the Mazdakite movement. Anastasius had refused Kavad money in 491, and he refused again when the king asked for funds to pay what he owed the Hephthalites. In 502 Kavad attacked Theodosiopolis and Roman Armenia, and early in 503 he took Amida on the upper Tigris after a long siege, the first Sasanian capture of the city since Shapur II in 359.

Europe

Ravenna had been the residence of western emperors since Honorius moved there in 402, and after Odoacer’s last stand there in 490 to 493 it became the capital of Theoderic’s Ostrogoths. Livius dates the church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo to 504, the Arian baptistery to about 510 and Theoderic’s mausoleum to 520. In Gaul the Frankish king Clovis had gone to war with the Alamanni and, in Gregory of Tours’ account, vowed on the battlefield to accept the god of his wife Clotilda; Remi, the bishop of Reims, baptized him, and more than 3,000 of his army with him. Gregory places the battle in the fifteenth year of the reign and gives no calendar year. In Britain the monk Gildas, writing in the 540s, remembered the siege of Mount Badon as the last great slaughter of the Saxons and the year of his own birth, 44 years and one month after the Saxons landed.

East Asia

Six years before AD 500 the Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen (r. 471–499) had moved his capital from Pingcheng, near the steppe frontier, to Luoyang on the Yellow River plain. He banned Xianbei dress and the Xianbei language at court, changed his own clan name from Tuoba to Yuan, and in 495 issued the Taihe five-zhu coin for the whole realm. His son Xuanwu (r. 499–515) had succeeded him in 499. In the southeast of the Korean peninsula Jijeung (r. 500–514) came to the throne of Silla. In 502, in the Samguk sagi annals as presented by the National Institute of Korean History, he forbade the burial of retainers with the dead and ordered the provinces to promote ox-drawn plowing; in the winter of 503 his ministers asked him to fix the state’s name, until then written Sara, Saro or Silla, as Silla, and to take the Chinese royal title wang.

South Asia

At Kusumapura, near the Gupta capital Pataliputra on the Ganges, a 23-year-old named Aryabhata finished the Aryabhatiya in 499. The MacTutor biography from the University of St Andrews lists what the text held: a place-value system for writing numbers, a table of sines, a value for pi of 62,832 divided by 20,000, or 3.1416, and the statement that the apparent turning of the heavens came from the rotation of the Earth. The Gupta empire was under pressure from the northwest. Kumaragupta had faced a Huna invasion in 454 to 455, his son Skandagupta had repelled it and then fought several later attacks, and, in A. D. H. Bivar’s account in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, around 510 the Hephthalite ruler Toramana set up his rule over much of northern and western India.

Central Asia

Between the Oxus and the Tarim the dominant power was the Hephthalite confederation, which had entered Bactria early in the fifth century. Bivar records that they killed the Sasanian king Peroz on his third campaign against them in 484, collected an indemnity in coin, and then held undisputed control of Central Asia, Khorasan and Afghanistan. Sogdiana, the belt of oasis towns around Samarkand and Bukhara, was in what the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art calls its peak of wealth and prominence, from the fourth into the eighth century, trading silk and Ferghana horses into China. North of the Gobi the Rouran, beaten by the Wei emperor Taiwu in 449, went on raiding the Wei frontier wall and its six garrisons.

• Who actually carried goods along the Silk Road?AD 600

The Americas

Teotihuacan, 27 miles northeast of the site of Mexico City, was the largest city of the ancient Americas. The Metropolitan Museum puts its height at about AD 400, with eight square miles and an estimated 125,000 to 200,000 residents, most of them living in walled apartment compounds. The city dealt with the Maya capitals of Tikal and Copán. At Copán, in what is now Honduras, the ruling dynasty was 74 years old: Altar Q, carved in 776, records that the founder K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ took the k’awiil scepter on September 5, 426, and arrived at Copán five months later, and Robert Sharer of the Penn Museum matched the left-handed founder to a left-handed man buried in the Hunal tomb.

Oceania

Nothing written survives from the Pacific or Australia for AD 500; the evidence is pottery, radiocarbon dates and DNA. Samoa had been settled about 800 BC, and a 2011 study of 1,434 radiocarbon dates by Janet Wilmshurst and three colleagues, published in PNAS, found that the 15 archipelagos of East Polynesia stayed empty until about AD 1025 to 1120, a pause of some 1,800 years. In AD 500 that pause was at its midpoint, and more than 500 remote islands, an ocean region the size of North America, were still unvisited.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Nikolaus Schindel: "Kawād I i. Reign" (2013, updated 2018)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, A. D. H. Bivar: "Hephthalites" (2003, updated 2013)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Northern Wei Dynasty 北魏 (386-534)" (updated April 2025)
• National Institute of Korean History (국사편찬위원회), 사료로 본 한국사: "지증왕의 정치 개혁" (Samguk sagi, Silla annals, Jijeung year 4)
• MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews, J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson: "Aryabhata the Elder" (2000)
• Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads: "Introduction"
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Vandals"
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Foundations of Aksumite Civilization and Its Christian Legacy (1st–8th Century)" (2000)
• Livius.org, Jona Lendering: "Ravenna"
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, Book II: The Conversion of Clovis" (translated by Ernest Brehaut, 1916)
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Gildas, Concerning the Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae)" (translated by J. A. Giles, 1848)
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: "Teotihuacan"
• Penn Museum, Expedition Magazine 54(1), Robert Sharer: "Copan Altar Q" (2012)
• PNAS 108(5) via PubMed Central, Wilmshurst, Hunt, Lipo and Anderson: "High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia" (2011)